We tend to think of surprise as a pleasant word: surprise party, birthday surprise, Gomer Pyle flashing a grin that stretched from Camp Pendleton to the Pentagon and repeating the word three times, every time.

On Wall Street, though, they understand there are two sides to this coin.

An “upside” surprise might send a stock soaring; a “downside surprise” makes only the shorts happy.

So it is in college basketball. For every bunch of Charlotte 49ers, surging from 13-17 to a 9-0 start, there is a Florida State, whose star player made headlines with his offseason talk but recently participated in three consecutive home losses. Including one to Mercer.

A month into this season, there are plenty of each.

Upside surprise: Larry Brown, head coach, SMU

We all knew he was one of the great basketball coaches of all time. Turns out he’s actually a wizard. That’s just about the only way to explain turning one of college basketball’s true wastelands into an 8-1 club. Some will focus on the identity of SMU’s opposition and dismiss what has happened here. Such declarations completely miss the point: That SMU is beating anybody is worthy of our amazement.

It should be no shock the Mustangs are running great offense. Their coach is Larry Brown. They’re shooting a fair percentage from the field (45.8) and beautifully from 3-point range because they don’t waste opportunities. Most impressive is the number of times they visit the foul line: 26 attempts per game. How impressive is that? Indiana is No. 1 in scoring and gets one more attempt per game than the Mustangs, who are 137th in scoring.

Downside: Villanova

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised a team as heavily dependent on young players as the Wildcats are on freshman Ryan Arcidiacono and sophomore Ashraf Yacoubou would be laboring to a 5-4 start. But it’s fair to be surprised the Wildcats have to depend so much on them when seniors Mouphtaou Yarou and Maurice Sutton are still in the program.

Sutton is a fifth-year player, and Yarou was one of the cornerstones of a 2009 recruiting class once ranked No. 2 in the nation by Scout.com. The rest of that class? Dominic Cheek, Isaiah Armwood and Maalik Wayns. None of them remains.

Upside: Brandon Paul, point guard, Illinois

You probably still think of him as a shooting guard, and he might, as well, but he plays as much point as anything—and he’s playing all of it ridiculously well. Paul is averaging 19.5 points and shooting 48.1 percent from the field; he’s never before shot better than 40 percent for a season.

New coach John Groce has put Paul at greater ease on the floor but not by being easy on him. Groce insisted Paul function like a leader. “Just because he’s a senior doesn’t mean he’s a leader,” the coach said. The coaches also wanted him to understand that being consistent in games came from consistent effort in practice.

Groce talked to him about “what consistency looked like, not being so up-and-down … I think he’s really embraced those things we’ve talked with him at great lengths about.”

Downside: Georgia

In one of the richest talent-producing states in the nation, the Bulldogs are shooting 38.8 percent from the floor (312th in Division I) and average 56.8 points (331st).

They also scheduled themselves into their current 2-6 hole, playing half their games against high majors and none of those four at home. The good news for UGA? It’s one of five SEC teams playing .500 or worse—which matches the total of the other five BCS conferences combined.

Upside: Marcus Smart, point guard, Oklahoma State

After watching Smart dominate yet another major opponent (South Florida) in yet another Cowboys victory, it felt like time to thumb through the Sporting News college basketball preview issue to double-check whether he’d been included on one of our three All-America teams. Alas, we missed on that, but he was one of the five players on our all-freshman team.

That still puts us far ahead of the person who, with a number of games passed, ranked Smart as the No. 14 freshman in the nation.

No. 14! Among freshmen!

People, Marcus Smart has been the best college player in the nation to this point.

We knew he was going to be great. We did not expect that. Smart ranks only third on the OK State team in scoring (13.4), but leads in rebounding (7.4) and assists (5.0). He’s had a completely transformative effect on a team that last season finished 15-18. It’s far too early to say who’ll be your Sporting News player of the year—UNLV’s Anthony Bennett is pushing for that, as well as freshman of the year—but Smart is in the conversation.

Downside: Assist/turnover ratio

The value of this stat began to wobble as Tyshawn Taylor led Kansas to the NCAA championship game with 1.4 assists per turnover, where KU faced Kentucky’s Marquis Teague (1.8 assists per turnover).

With UCLA drowning despite Larry Drew getting 4.6 assists for every turnover, we can pretty much bury this number. If a team has more turnovers than assists, there’s little doubt it has ballhandling issues. But the collegiate obsession with turnovers has transformed a generation of point guards into mice, fearful of attempting anything daring lest they be scolded by analysts waving stat sheets.

In two seasons at Georgetown, Allen Iverson’s assist/turnover ratio was 1.1-to-1.